Posts Tagged ‘Arab Spring’

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will discuss with the Cabinet Sunday on how to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Movement in an effort to restore calm and end the violence that has spread deep into the urban areas of Israel.

(An earlier version of this article incorrectly state that the Prime Minister would meet with radical Islamic leaders.)

Hundreds of policemen have been deployed through the country to prevent violence, Hundreds of Arabs from Kalkilya, adjacent to the Tel Aviv metropolitan city of Kfar Saba, approached the high-speed highway 6 (Kvish 6), where motorists were pelted by rocks this week.

The police closed the road for several minutes before restoring order. Part of Highway 444 near Netanya was closed after Arabs from the city of Taybeh rioted for at least the second time this week.

The repaid escalation of violence beyond eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria has clearly alarmed the country.

Prime Minister Netanyahu announced Saturday night that in addition to his attempt to deal with radicla Islamic violence, 250 reserve Border Police have been mobilized.

He stated: The three companies will reinforce the Israel Police in Jerusalem and throughout the country. An increased presence is a primary preventive and deterrent measure.

Security forces also are increasing surveillance over social media, which is being used as it was in the Arab Spring revolutions to promote violence.

The officer of the Prime Minister also said that the Prime Minister told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday that “he expects the Palestinian Authority to stop its wild and mendacious incitement, which is causing the current wave of terrorism.

The statement added:

Kerry said he is aware of the fact that it is Israel’s policy to maintain the status quo and not change it.

An Arab Spring rebellion against Hamas may be blowing into Gaza as summer ends, Channel 2 television reported.

The match they may ignite a full-scale rebellion may have been lit yesterday by a corn vendor, who poisoned himself after Hamas closed down his stand. He now is in critical condition in a Gaza hospital.

The television channel’s English report stated:

He decided to protest in a manner that has an uncanny resemblance to the Tunisian Revolution that led to the Arab Spring.

It added that “many” Arabs in Gaza are calling for protests and are urging people burn down Hamas institutions.

By all accounts, Gaza has been a hell-hole ever since the Oslo War, or Second Intifada, when Yasser Arafat’s campaign of terror forced Jews in Gaza and in urban centers in Israel to stop employing Arabs because of terrorist attacks.

The situation deteriorated even more when Hamas ousted leaders form the Fatah movement, headed by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, in a bloody war in 2007.

The international campaign to blame the mostly non-existent Israeli “blockade” for Gaza’s economic woes doesn’t stand up within Gaza, where Arabs know that the Hamas regime is corrupt to the core and treats them like the corn vendor.

It is not clear if an Arab Spring indeed will blow into Gaza, but there are enough rival terrorist organizations that might exploit the opportunity to plant the seeds to overthrow Hamas and possibly bring even more misery, such as Islamic Jihad or the Islamic State.

Coincidentally or not, Iran on Wednesday reiterated support for Hamas as well as other terrorist organizations and said that helping those who “stand against the Zionist regime is a principle of Iran’s policy.”

A journalist for more than 40 years, Mark Lavie was based in Jerusalem for most of them and then in Cairo for two – during the “Egyptian Revolution.”

Lavie is no longer a journalist.

But he didn’t leave the profession, “it left me,” Lavie says.

Now Lavie is speaking out in as many fora as possible. He seeks to alert the public about the dramatic difference between what journalism used to be – and still pretends to be – and what it actually is.

Lavie’s conclusions shouldn’t surprise many readers of The Jewish Press. But those conclusions, and the detail Lavie provides as someone who lived for so long within the belly of the beast, provides a stunning rebuke – especially to the Associated Press, where Lavie worked for fifteen years. AP has long been criticized as biased against Israel. Lavie provides eye-witness testimony that:

A recent account by another former AP reporter, Matti Friedman, indicting AP editor Steve Gutkin for killing a story about a 2008 peace proposal advanced by Israel, drew a sharp and categorical denial by the AP director of press relations and the now ex-editor Gutkin. They asserted flatly that Friedman was wrong and that what he said happened didn’t happen. But now Lavie weighs in: “I was there,” he told The Jewish Press. “Gutkin said to can” that article.

More broadly and more deeply, Lavie is profoundly pessimistic about the quality of the work put out by AP and most sources of mainstream journalism today. Driven as they are by the Internet’s insatiable appetite for the latest flash, people who call themselves reporters are interested, he says, primarily if not exclusively in speed, not substance.

Perhaps even worse, Lavie provides direct testimony that journalists no longer even pretend that their job is to report facts. Instead, he’s been told by former colleagues, the job of the media is to advocate for those actors on the world stage that the journalists feel deserve support – to “speak truth to power.”

“But that isn’t the job journalists are supposed to do!” Lavie cries. “The job of journalists is to take a significant story and make it interesting, by explaining it and putting it in context.”

Lavie had a front row seat to the seismic changes in the Middle East, including every major outbreak of fighting, terrorist attack and peace negotiation efforts over the past nearly half a century. He also was ringside in Cairo when the “Arab Spring” was revealed to him as a “Broken Spring,” instead. That is also the name of his recently updated book and his blog.

Lavie severed his relationship with AP and, in the past few months, has been sharing some inconvenient truths about how journalism has changed including at AP, and especially in the Middle East.

Outsiders have long believed that the mainstream media is consistently and intentionally biased against Israel. Lavie confirms that view, and he does so with the credentials garnered by enduring a long-term sojourn in the belly of the beast. Lavie is also center-left, a supporter of the Geneva Initiative, a committed Two-Stater.

Given Lavie’s experience, his politics and his ringside seat, his message deserves as broad an audience as possible. That message is: virtually all reporting about the Middle East is sifted so that only one side comes out. And some critical information never even makes it into the sifter at all.

First, Lavie has a lot to say about the general state of journalism throughout the world and how the social media revolution has led to catastrophic consequences.

The rise of social media as a delivery service for news is the equivalent of the bubonic plague. The consequences are many and nearly all destructive. The reduction in reportorial and editorial budgets has meant that fewer reporters are in the field, and those fewer are required not just to get there and get it out first, but also to tweet and to blog while reporting and to “own” each breaking story. The frenzied pace leaves little time or energy for fact-checking or deep-sourcing.

It’s not just the promise, of course. It’s the Bidenesque way he makes it:

Monday, Biden had to remind Israeli leaders that the U.S. is not seeking a negotiation with Iran at Israel’s expense.

“I have heard so much malarkey about our position on Iran,” Biden said. “We will not let Iran acquire a nuclear weapon, period. I would not put my 42-year reputation on the line if I were not certain when I say it. We mean it.”

Daniel Greenfield casts a doubt or two on that 42-year reputation, and that’s fair enough. We would be fools to take seriously such assurances from Joe Biden.

But there are reasons why Iran may well delay that moment of focused provocation when the radical Islamic regime proves itself nuclear armed. If the Iranians don’t have the means to offer that proof yet, they are very close to it – so close that it is now their choice how fast to move, and in what way.

Where we are

Iran now lacks only the public demonstration of uranium enrichment to a weapons-grade level (above 95%), and a detectable warhead detonation. To talk of a “breakout” capacity – a bomb-in-waiting – as something we are still looking for is now misleading. Using such terms suggests that there is something more we need to see from Iran, before we officially set the breakout watch.

But the reality is that there is nothing we have yet to see that we can reliably expect to see. We’ve reached the point at which it is prudent to assume the breakout watch has already started – and imprudent not to.

Fifteen years ago, Iran did not have a reliable uranium enrichment process; did not have an industrial-scale infrastructure for enrichment; did not have a stockpile of enriched uranium; did not have her own uranium production capacity; did not have a detonator mechanism for a uranium warhead; did not have a missile that could deliver a nuclear warhead; and did not have anything close to an intercontinental missile capability.

As little as six years ago, moreover, the United States had more than enough ready combat power, between our Air Force and Navy, to quickly strike a meaningful blow against an Iranian nuclear infrastructure that was still comparatively rudimentary and geographically concentrated.

Reminder: Nothing has interrupted the trend of Iran’s uranium enrichment. Red column shows low-enriched UF6 stockpiled (versus total cumulative enrichment in blue), once Iran began enriching some stock to 20% in Jan 2012. Although Iran has “downblended” her 20%-enriched stock, the rate of increase in the total stockpile of 5% LEU has been robust: 17% from 11/13 to 11/14. (Data source: IAEA)

Iran’s vision for the future has been shaped, as everyone’s has, by the consequences of the Arab Spring. It has also been shaped by the withdrawal of American power under Obama.

Four or five years ago, Iran took as a given the U.S. posture in the larger Middle East. That posture included a key strategic presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan; close partnerships with almost all the Gulf Cooperation Council nations; special relationships, including military cooperation, with both Egypt and Israel; and unchallenged supremacy on the regional seas.

Iran also set her sights on chokepoints in the regional waterways, from the Strait of Hormuz through the Red Sea and all the way to Morocco and the Strait of Gibraltar. No one was close to having a navy that could challenge the U.S. Navy, but even great navies are vulnerable in chokepoints.

At a kind of eschatological-strategic level, meanwhile, just as the Arab Spring was unfolding in early 2011, Iranian TV was running a mullah-approved “documentary” that outlined a scheme of military preparation for the arrival of the “twelfth imam.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad figured as a great military commander from Shia prophecy in this fantastical oeuvre, which depicted a dénouement in the armed conquest of Jerusalem. (“Rescuing” Jerusalem had already figured for years in Iranian policy rhetoric, as well as in the concept of some major military exercises.)

Where Iran now wants to be

In the years since Obama took office, much has changed. One thing hasn’t, and that’s Iran’s interest in gaining leverage at critical chokepoints in the regional seaways. But some of the focused urgency has been bled out of the pressure campaign against America’s regional partners, in part because of the Arab Spring, and in part because Barack Obama has been doing an excellent job of peeling them away from us himself.

The momentum of Iran’s efforts has shifted to a new, more geographically focused vector, one that as recently as 2011 appeared to be unthinkable. Where once Iran was confined to putting general pressure on various American partners in the region, and perhaps maneuvering to leapfrog nearby territory in which we seemed established – Iraq, Jordan, Israel – Iran can now realistically contemplate making an “internal” line of communication (LOC) through that territory. She might accomplish that by proxy first, and then, eventually, exploit the LOC directly.

In fact, with much of the territory in question now disputed between ISIS and a weak Iraqi government, Iran has all the more reason for being there, with advisors and military equipment.

The bonus? The U.S., weakened and compromised as our power is, has signed up to do at least some of the fighting against ISIS. If Iran plays her cards right, American forces will open her strategic LOC through the heart of the Middle East for her.

A few months ago, an Israeli-Arab, a Bedouin, a man for whom Israel provided education and every opportunity to better himself (as it does for every citizen), who as a result rose from the lowest socio-economic level in the country to becoming a doctor at one of Israel’s most respected hospitals, went and joined ISIS and got himself killed.

As I write this, Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and now in parts of the rest of the country, are destroying themselves, trying their best to bring the Arab Ice-Age to Israel.

Some claim, if only we integrate Arabs better, or collect their garbage more often, or pave more potholes, things would be different.

Those claims, ignore the ongoing investments that have been made in Arab communities. Those claims ignore the educational opportunities Israeli-Arabs receive. Those claims ignore that the Jerusalem Light Rail which Jerusalem’s Arabs have been destroying is the same train they otherwise take to work. Those claims ignore the reality in front of them.

The Israeli-Arab doctor who joined ISIS didn’t join because he didn’t have indoor toilet in his tent.

The Israeli-Arab joined ISIS because his own Arab-Islamic culture encouraged it.

Some secularist want to claim that its the fault of Yehudah Glick and other Jews who go up to the Temple Mount, who are instigating these riots. Or maybe Jews buying homes from Arabs at above market-value prices.

And while its true, more Jews want to go up and pray than ever, the reality is that Glick has been going up for years, and it’s not Glick nor any Jews that initiated or instigated the violence. That’s like blaming the rape victim.

The war stems from both Arab-Islamic culture, as well as from our own Israeli secularists who don’t understand the nature of this unidirectional religious war.

In 1967, Rabbi Goren wanted to initiate Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, and he even succeeded for a short time. He even suggested that Israel take the mosque down, and correctly pointed out that this would be Israel’s only opportunity to do so.

But instead, avowed secularist Moshe Dayan mistakenly gave up the Temple Mount to the completely flabbergasted Arabs who not only expected Israel to do its worse, but after losing so spectacularly, would have quietly accepted the worst Israel could have done.

The riots we have now in Jerusalem, stem 100% from Moshe Dayan’s frightful secular-inspired mistake.

The Arab-Islamists learned that the secular Israeli has no respect for his own history, birthright, heritage and religion. They didn’t see restraint as stemming from strength. They saw fear. And then inspired them to fight on, rather than confront their deepest fear.

Secular Jews think this is a war about land. If they think it’s a religious war at all, they blame religious Jews for it.

But even if every Jew in Israel were secular, we’d still be in a religious war with the Arab-Islamists, because for them this is a religious war for their own survival.

It’s not because the Temple Mount or even the Land of Israel is specifically important to them.

It is the center of their religious battle with us, because Jewish control over the Temple Mount negates the tenets of their Islamic faith — and that fraudulence is a crisis they can’t deal with. The closer Jews are to controlling the Temple Mount, the closer we are to negating their religion in their eyes, and the more they need to fight us.

This latest Intifada will be quelled by Israel, though how long it will take will depend on Israel’s determination to win.

But until Israel starts respecting Jewish rights to our holy sites, temporarily quelled or not, this war will continue.

T.S. Eliot was wrong. March, not April, is the cruelest month. Certainly it is at New York University. In the early days of the month a conference took place there on “Circuits of Influence: United State, Israel, and Palestine.” The conference was organized by Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, whose academic fields at NYU are listed as lesbian and gay studies, and the history of gender and sexuality.

Professor Duggan is a gender scholar rather than a political scientist renowned for expertise in Middle East history and politics. She is presently president-elect of the American Studies Association (ASA) that on December 4, 2013 disgraced itself and the academic world by its ignorance, its bias, and its bigotry in calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The resolution of the ASA, by 66 per cent of voters, endorsed the Palestinian call for a boycott because of alleged denial of Palestinian basic rights by Israel. The resolution said nothing about the denial of women’s basic rights by Palestinians and other Arabs.

Professor Duggan’s invitation to the conference was ironic. It was sent only to selected recipients, and said, “Please do not post or circulate the flyer (about the conference). We are trying to avoid press, protestors, and publication.” It was ironic because the conference avoided confrontation by inviting only those who were not known for their pro-Israeli views.

The NYU meeting was not exactly secret, but it was a closed-door conference. To no great surprise, it coincided with the celebration of Israel Apartheid Week. It may perhaps have been described as a meeting discussing the Protocols of the Learned Leaders of the boycotters or the New York friends of the ASA.
It is not clear, though one can guess the reasons, why leaders of an association created to deal with American studies, and especially if they are most interested in women’s issues, make declarations on Middle Eastern affairs or why they are primarily or solely concerned with the State of Israel. One would have thought that Professor Duggan and other members of the ASA might be more properly concerned with the problems that women encounter in Arab Middle East societies, including that of Palestinian.

The nature of those problems is detailed in reports of NGO Monitor and various think tanks. Women in all the Middle East countries, except Israel, have few rights, and do not enjoy equality with men. The gender gap in those countries is among the highest in the world. Women are discriminated against in almost all relationships and activities, in marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. They are restricted in movement, expression, and work opportunities. Women suffer from being forced into child marriage, female genital mutilation, and “honor” crimes, which may be punished by death.

Professor Duggan and her ASA colleagues must know that there has been no significant improvement in women’s lives in spite of the “Arab spring.” In most Arab countries women are marginalized; in Islamic societies they are repressed. She should know that the lack of freedom for women in all Middle East countries, except Israel, is a major problem in the world today. Have she and her colleagues in the ASA, reported on this? Are they so concerned with their ideological attack on Israel that they have no time or thought for the political and social freedom of women? Even though they are supposedly interested in American studies, why do the members of ASA not state clearly and unequivocally that women in the Arab world including the Palestinians should enjoy the same rights and opportunities as women in Israel?

Let’s deliver a clear message from the 1993 UN Vienna Declaration to Duggan and the ignorant and biased boycotters of Israel. The Declaration called for the full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at all levels, and eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex.

It may well be, as the UN Arab Human Development report of 2005 said, that it is beyond the power and resources of women’s movements to affect the condition of women in the Middle East. But perhaps Duggan, with the support of other women in the ASA, might have organized a conference on the subject. She might have addressed the problem of why the 2011 departure of dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya has not led to fundamental reforms for women.

The UN Arab Human Development Reports (AHDR), written by Arab scholars about conditions in the 22 member states of the Arab League, have recognized the major problem: the oppression of women. Women suffer from inequality with men and are vulnerable to discrimination in law and in practice. The prevailing masculine culture and values view women as dependents of men. Those AHDR reports clearly state the need for change: Arab societies must provide for the complete empowerment of Arab women. Specifically, they should deal with illiteracy (more than half of Arab women are illiterate), the low rate of education of women, maternal mortality, and the low participation of women in politics.

The statistics in the Global Gender Gap Index, compiled by the World Economic Forum, which measures gender-based disparities, confirms the AHDR conclusions. Of the 136 countries analyzed in terms of the access of women to education, political participation, economic opportunity, and health, the Arab countries come last. Political empowerment of women in Saudi Arabia and Qatar is listed as zero.

Gender-based discrimination exists in personal status laws which require permission of a male relative for marriage, favor husbands in divorce cases, give fathers the rights in child guardianship, restrict freedom of movement, make it difficult for women to get a passport, and deprive women of their proper inheritance. In the law courts the testimony of women is regarded as of less value than that of men in a number of countries. Dress codes for women are enforced by the religious police force.

Beyond all this legal and social inequality there is the matter of domestic violence against women. Rape is usually not seen as a criminal offense. Honor killings exist in many of the Arab societies, including that of the Palestinian Authority. It is legal for women to be beheaded, burnt alive, stoned, and tortured for “immoral” behavior such as adultery or having sexual relations with a non-Muslim man. They are also forbidden to marry non-Muslims. On the other hand, polygamy is legal in a number of Arab countries.

Given her scholarship on the history of sexuality, Professor Duggan must surely be familiar with the sad condition of women in all Middle East countries except Israel, where women have full social and political rights. Can we expect her as the leader of ASA, to organize a conference on that sad condition and to call for equality and justice for women in the Arab countries? If not, she may be judged guilty of indifference to the problems of women.
Originally published at The American Thinker.

I’m going to be honest. I don’t agree with everything my old buddy Avi Lipkin is up to nowadays, but I think his “1000 days in Syria” talk is excellent and definitely something everyone should listen to.